Though database software and services serve similar purposes, we had to take different approaches to test performance in each category. Software-based databases easily handle tables with thousands of records, so we focused on how quickly queries could move through large amounts of data. But we could not run these tests with the online databases, because they let users store only a few megabytes of information. Furthermore, none of the services offer the complex querying tools found in the software products. Searches are limited to one field at a time or keyword lookups.

We discovered some interesting facts about the software products. We ran two tests on a Windows 2000based 550-MHz Dell Dimension XPS T550 that had 256MB of RAM. First, we queried three indexed fields from a 17-field table that contained over 1 million records. Then we searched three unindexed fields in the same database. While Microsoft Access 2002 and Corel Paradox 10 are able to run both queries on the data as is, FileMaker Pro 5.5 defaults to indexing any field being queried. This should not affect your query time with small databases, but as the file grows, the latency becomes noticeable: The unindexed test took over 47 minutes! When we disabled automatic indexing, FileMaker was much faster (13 minutes 21 seconds) but still significantly slower than its competitors.

With the Web-based services, we focused on how long it takes to import dataan important consideration when moving your data online. We uploaded a 1MB, comma- separated value (CSV)formatted database to each service through a DSL connection. We ran the test at three different times during the day to determine when the services processed data the fastest. The variance was minimal, leading us to believe that Internet traffic is not an issue for online databases. If these services become more popular, however, Internet traffic might come into play.

Caspio Bridge's upload ran smoothly and was the fastest in the roundup. QuickBase was also hassle-free. But to our surprise, importing our file wasn't always as simple as we had anticipated. The Web sites have strict guidelines for how a file should be formatted and uploaded. eCriteria requires the CSV file to contain field names. The service was problematic in many other ways as well. Our first several attempts to upload to the service were unsuccessful; the site gave us several errors and required us to fix the problems off-line and then upload again.

Coordinize.com allows files to be uploaded only into the address book database; its other database templates don't offer an import option. The Coordinize and QuickBase timings include file upload and table creation (they complete both tasks in one step), but the Caspio Bridge and eCriteria timings refer only to the upload. Caspio Bridge took an additional 4 minutes to create the table, while eCriteria took 2.

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